I’ve never fallen in love with a photograph. The static image just doesn’t do it for me. How do faces blossom? Eyes widen and brighten, or grow pensive and downcast? What do the hands say?

It’s hard to write about Michael Schmidt. To fix a form onto one of the liveliest beings I’ve ever met. Can the words constant and mercurial fit into one sentence? A constantly listening heart, and incessantly switched-on brainpower.

Something in me danced, on learning that my new University of Glasgow boss was Mexican. The sun on the other side of the world, the awesome awareness of pre-Columbian cultures, formed his interior landscape. His wicked playfulness and elegant erudition took on a more approachable air. I felt unspoken comfort that another hemisphere homed us both. For him, too, body language and frames of reference were endlessly in translation.

So. Here are three scenes. Movement. Not album leaves. Not vignettes.

One. I’m a new lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and Michael Schmidt lets me use the attic office he’s leaving. Mineralic, oystershell, demi-sec light pours in through the window. There is an amazing collection of books, and with boyish generosity, Professor Schmidt turns to me, wanting to give me as many as I need or want. He wants to hand on a tradition, the chance of conversations with the living and the dead, and it’s still an ache that precarity made me refuse these precious companions, unsure where or how long I’d be able to house them; yet I feel ...